Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Should I use black?

There has been a school of thought that said black should be excluded from the palette. But a lot of great painters have used it. I do have black on my palette but I could live without it and I don't use a lot. Following are my thoughts on the subject.

The most common black is Ivory black but recently there have been a lot of favorable things said about mars black, a relatively new color. Mars colors are oxides of iron made by earthly industry and not actually of extraterrestrial origin. I have tried mars black and thought it was too inky and returned to the ivory black, but I may experiment with it more as it gets high marks for permanence. Ivory black is not an ideal color. It sucks up a lot of oil and can cause some problems in drying. But I like it and am used to it.There are several arguments against the use of black. Less experienced painters like to make their shadow notes by adding black to the local color of the object they are painting. This is a dreadful practice.The shadow color is not a dark version of the lights, it is its own color and must be either observed or formulated on its own. Also painting your shadows with black precludes controlling the temperature of your shadow, and that's important. Black will make your shadows dead. Black kills luminosity. Teachers got so tired of seeing students do this that they insisted on removing black from the students palettes to force them to mix the colors of the shadows chromatically. If you are not an experienced painter I think this is certainly good advice.

There are a number of ways to make a DARK note. Viridian and alizirin makes squids ink. Burnt sienna and ultramarine makes a nice dark also. Red, yellow and blue, mixed together is the definition of black, it is the presence of all colors, white is the absence of color. (in pigments, light is a different game) so if you are using a three color palette that will make your darkest value.

I use black because it is handy, I think of it as just another pigment on my palette but it has an interesting property, it will drop the value of a color without affecting its temperature much. I also like to use a red hot version of black for my darkest accents. Black can be used to make a lot of grays but I always throw something else in there too so as not to have a dead color and to vary my different grays. I also like to sneak black into skies. The old masters often worked without a blue, they had few of them and they were expensive, If a landscape is warm as so many of the old ones are, by contrast a sky made with black will look blue by contrast. I often sneak black into my skies because it looks just slightly blue. I will "break " it very thinly over a sky I have painted with full color just to tone it down a bit.

Black can also be used to get a pearly look. There is a peculiar effect it has when mixed with white and used in a high key. I think Corot did a lot of that. Greens can also be mixed with black or other greens neutralized with it. It is always handy to have an additional way to make greens, particularly those that are not chartreuse and poisonous. Black tends to make olive colors.

So my advice is, unless you are an experienced painter learn to mix all of your colors from a chromatic palette. If you have built enough expertise to keep it in check and use black judiciously it is a handy pigment to have around.

I use black and I use raw umber. I use them as colors themselves when mixing and I use them as modifiers to knock down chroma, black for cool and umber for warm colors. I can and do use compliments for this as well, it depends on the situation. I think your right that a lot of the prejudice against black has to do with something someones teacher told them when they over used it and then that became thought of as important to how they work. I think to insist on not using it is to admit not being able to use it wisely, a matter of self control. Like most things it is fine in moderation.

I use black when my subject is actually black. The very first time I ever used black was when I painted my black tuxedo cat posed next to a snow bank on a "black" street. I used no black on the street or in the bank, but the black portions of the cat were almost flat black. Almost flat, so that the small shadings around the white bib look very important. Still love that painting.

If I recall, my teachers told us not to use black because the Impressionists didn't. I wondered how old Manet and Renoir got away with it? ;)I love using it in a limited palette like you said, Stape, for the blues and mixed with yellow for the greens. Lately, I have been playing with Chromatic Black (Gamblin). If you try it, let us know what you think, please.

I have a theory that black oil paint was invented by the art devil. At least when I try to use it.

Despite years of psychotherapy, the voice of my old first art teacher warning against it rings in my ears. I get off balance and screw up.

It's funny, as I can mix those beautiful pearly light value off whites with it and as long as they stay on my palette I'm fine. It's in the transporting them to the canvas that something goes haywire. More seriously, I think black is fine for other EXPERIENCED painters. Me, I'll stay over in the mixing complements together department.

Stapleton, your blog is really a treasure. It's helping my painting, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

On the subject of black, here's something worth trying that I learned from lurking on the Rational Painting group: mix black with a small amount of burnt umber to neutralize its cool characteristic. Then, mix a string of values of this with increasing amounts of white (at first with very small amounts, then gradually with larger amounts to get roughly equal "steps"). This gives you a range of neutral grays. Take another color (ultramarine, cadmium red, whatever) and mix a string of values of that with increasing amounts of white. Then, mix the corresponding value gray with the corresponding value color in varying amounts to knock down the chroma of your color as needed. It's a little tedious, but it seems to work very well. By using the corresponding value gray, you can lower the chroma of a given color without changing its value.

Painting some "scales" of color values and chromas on cheap canvases and paper with this system has taught me a lot about color/value/chroma in the past year. In practice when I'm actually painting I don't tend to work in such a systematic way, but the experience of playing with that system has helped me reach the color, value, and chroma I'm looking for a lot more quickly, even when I'm not using black.

I agree 100%! I advise my students who are new to painting not to put black on their palette, I don't regularly use it on mine except on rare occasions as you suggest. Ultramarine & burnt umber or sometimes burnt sienna make a wonderful dark, I use that combo frequently.

I suppose I do use a somewhat chromatic black as I mix blues and reds into it. I mostly use Ivory as well. As I said I add Ultramarine and Permanent Crimson to black.

Using black takes a lot of practice and I think all painters should learn to use it with every color on their palette. You can do this by mixing it by different percentages. 10%, 20%, 30% and so on. Do the same with white.

It's a good exercise. The painter Richard Schmid does something like this with all the colors on his palette but he does it with all the colors on the palette not just white and black.

I mix a string of grays as Bill described.

I can see however not needing black in the field, but I like the color myself. Most blacks are in the blue family so it is a color.

About Me

I am a professional landscape painter.I make my living painting pictures.
In my blog I show my paintings, offer some of the techniques, ideas and methods I have learned over the years, and talk about how to make a living as an artist. I present some essays on painting, art, and hopefully amuse you some at the same time. I will also tell you about many of the fine painters I have known over the years and some who died long ago. I talk about my training in the studios of R.H.Ives Gammell and about the many artists who have mentored me along the way. I also try to explain what I THINK makes a good painting, and how to go about making one.
If you have just found this blog, I suggest you go back to the earliest posts and read forward. It is now an enormous archive of about a thousand posts. The posts start out with the most basic information and progress towards the more philosophical side of painting. I hope you will find it useful!
.............Stape

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